


“are you sure?”

by clickingkeyboards



Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [51]
Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Best Friends, F/M, Fluff, Post-Canon, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 23:28:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21977305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: Hazel has news to deliver to Alexander, but fate has other plans to make it as annoying as possible for her to do it.Canon EraWritten for the fifty-first prompt in the '100 ways to say "I love you"' prompt list by p0ck3tf0x on Tumblr.
Relationships: Alexander Arcady/Hazel Wong
Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [51]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533164
Kudos: 24





	“are you sure?”

I think I might faint.

My husband Alexander is undercover in Scotland for a case with the Junior Pinkertons (which consists of himself and his best friend and co-chair George Mukherjee), while my own best friend Daisy is cleaning up some things in France which consist of declassifying her fake identities from the war so the French do not think that they have seventeen unaccounted for mysterious young women. Back in London, I am working on the other end of the clean-up operation, breaking the codes of transmissions between members of the Nazi party to expose the locations of any landmines and bombs planted in France that may surprise those piecing the Western Front back together.

It has been six months since Alexander I were married, in March of 1946, yet it still feels as if the war is raging on the Western Front. My work revolves around the war, as does Daisy’s, while Alexander and George’s cases constantly lead back to alliances, spies, affiliations.

However, that is not why I may faint.

I arrive home from the government facility I work at, turning the key in the lock and taking off my shoes at the door. Daisy’s bedroom is locked as a precaution against German skies, as it has been since she left. Her threat/promise from when we were younger has rung true throughout my life and she has taken up partial residence in the Arcady family home. This is only one of her many places of residence, though one of her most prominent. Daisy rotates between our house, Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy’s house, Bertie and Harold’s flat, and hers and George’s flat. Because they share a flat, there is often a misconception that they are together, which could not be further from the truth; George has not the least bit of interest in romance, while Daisy is in the business of rekindling a romance with Amina El Maghrabi.

On the doormat is a letter with the name of the doctor’s office Alexander and I visit. Neither of us had the foggiest idea of how to get a family practitioner when we moved in together. Luckily, (not for the first or last time) George normal-London-life Mukherjee felt charitable and stepped in to help us.

I open it with the knife letter-opener Alexander got Daisy for her birthday (Daisy threw it over her shoulder while getting the card out and only my timely intervention rescued it from the fate of the waste paper basket) and take out the letter.

There is plenty of medical jargon, a lot of names and places I do not care about, and…

_Your result is: POSITIVE._

Instinctively, I make a beeline for the phone and am halfway to dialling the phone number of the boarding house in France that Daisy is staying in before I realise that you are supposed to tell your husband about your pregnancy before you tell your best friend.

I call the hotel room that Alexander and George are staying in, and George picks up.

Clearly, he is having a conversation with a suspect that he wants to end as fast as possible either because his charming way of getting information from suspects has backfired on him and turned the conversation sexual, or because they are close to making him the next victim.

I know this because I become his way out. 

“Rosemary, dearest!” he answers the phone in a loud voice. “How wonderful of you to call me!”

“Say whatever you need to,” I reply in low tones, long accustomed to being the person using convenient phone calls as an out from an uncomfortable detection situation. “Give me as much information as possible about what imaginary person I am.”

“Oh, I _know_ ,” he replies with a laugh. “I promise that I’ll be home for our wedding anniversary, dearest. Is Teddy sleeping well?”

“How old am I?” I ask through gritted teeth. “How long have we been married? What’s your cover story?”

A rustling noise that is obviously George curling the wire around his finger emanates from the handset before he says, “I can’t believe that Teddy is almost thirteen months! It seems like yesterday. Though you’re always saying that it seems like yesterday that you were fifteen. Being twenty-eight is a far cry from fifteen, I’m afraid.”

He pauses as if listening for a reply, then continues with, “Oh, I only joke, dearest! You don’t look a day older than you were on our wedding day five years ago.”

“Are you using your normal names?” I ask. “Is it the usual cover story?”

“Oh, absolutely! Yes, my dearest, I wouldn’t dream of anything else.”

With a rustle, the phone is snatched and a harsh female voice snaps, “I suspect that your husband is trying to get me to confess to a crime I didn’t commit! I don’t think that he is who he says he is. I know all about this because of my husband: he is a _spy_! Over the last few days, I have learnt so much about him and I don’t believe that any of it is true. So I shall ask you some questions.”

“Oh, of course!” I twitter in a high and squeaking voice. 

I spend the next several minutes answering question after question from this woman before she huffs and stalks out of the hotel room. George catches the receiver she drops and says, “Hazel, my dear! I’m so sorry about that! She isn’t a spy of any sort but her husband has a decently high-up position so she thinks that she owns the world. You saved me from potentially blowing my cover, thank you so much. What did you call for?”

“Oh, just wondering when the trip ends,” I reply in an effort to sound nonchalant.

“We’re hoping to have it wrapped up by Wednesday and home in London by Thursday.” After a pause, he adds, “Alexander says that he loves you, is looking forward to sleeping beside you again, and misses you to the heavens. I can attest to that last one. He will not stop talking about you when we are alone.”

“I’m glad to know that he misses me,” I tell him with a smile. “Anything else you need?”

“Yes, actually,” he notes with shock. “When we wrap this up, we need to be able to leave the convention and go to Glasgow to speak to the officials. They’re trying to keep it hushed up here because the victim is so high profile but Alexander and I must go to alert the highest officials we can reach within an hour.”

“What do you want me to do?” I ask.

“When we’ve solved it or are close to solving it, I’ll call you and ask you to send a telegram detailing some sort of family emergency. Then we can use that telegram to get out of the convention and go to Glasgow, and then we can come back to the town we’re in and do our denouement with the Glasgow officials by our sides.”

That sounds doable, a distraction from the news I will be delivering on Thursday. “I’ll do it. Give my love to Alexander, please.”

“You’re an angel, Hazel Wong. But I’m not kissing your husband for you.”

“ _George!_ ”

While he laughs his head off, I hear footsteps in the background. “The investigators are demanding to speak to the business partners, George. Someone has spin-doctored rumours of homosexuality between us, which I suppose is fair enough but I love Hazel rather too much to— who are you speaking to?”

Obviously accompanying the words with air quotes, George says, “My wife.”

“Who was the unlucky source of the convenience escape phone call?” Alexander asks with a laugh.

“ _Your_ wife,” he says, his voice becoming distance over the course of the two syllables as he passed the handset over.

“Hazel!” he yelps, snatching the phone in a rustle of plastic. “Hazel, love!”

“Alexander,” I reply, feeling myself melt against the sofa cushions in relaxation just from the sound of his voice. “Hello, my love. It’s good to hear your voice.”

“You too, my love,” he says, and I can hear the emotion flooding into his voice. “I miss you. I wish that you were here detecting with us.”

“The British government calls, my love,” I reply, running a thumb over the woodwork on the arm of the sofa. “You’ll be back in a few days.”

The noise of him coiling the plastic of the wire around his finger rustled down the line and into my ear. “A few days is too long, Hazel. Hopefully, our cases without you and Daisy will not take us as far as Scotland for a while after this.”

“You don’t have to give up exciting cases for me, Alexander,” I tell him, leaning my head against the wood rising from the back of the sofa. “I know that you’ll always come home.”

“And _I_ know that _you’ll_ always come home to me, love.” There is a comfortable pause before he says, “George is mock-vomiting.”

I burst out laughing, reminded all over again why I love my friends. “Tell him that he can go and fuck himself.”

Alexander relays the message and I hear raucous laughter in the background.

“How was work, love?” Alexander asks when we have finished laughing.

“It went well. We found the location of several bombs, landmines, and traps. And one letter we decoded accidentally reunited two sweethearts separated by the war: one was Jewish and the other was Aryan.”

With a chuckle, he says, “Your cases always manage to bring people together.”

“Egypt was an incredibly lucky fluke.” I can’t help but believe that what he says is true. Over the course of our cases, all of us have been brought closer. George and I are closer as people who are different, Daisy and I are closer than ever as best friends, and it brought Alexander and I together as lovers.

“Of course it was. But we all know that Daisy Wells never does anything by accident.”

There is manic knocking on a door at the other end, and George says, “Come on, Alex, we must go and convince everyone that we are too invested in our wives to be homosexually involved.”

“That’s true for one of us,” he quips, before saying, “I love you. I will be with you soon, I swear!”

“Hurry home, Alexander.”

How domestic we are.

* * *

Three hours later and I am bursting to tell somebody. Daisy called me after I called the boys and we talked for hours, the entire time with me bursting to tell her the good news. I was so restless to burst it out to the world that I decided to disclose it to somebody: Ah Lan, a young man who used to work on the grounds of my family compound in Hong Kong. Since he fled from Hong Kong in 1941, he has been living in Madrid and studying philosophy, and we write letters regularly.

Due to how difficult it is to get letters to Spain through France, the letter should not reach Ah Lan until long after I have told Alexander, but I can get it all out of my head and onto paper.

_Dear Ah Lan,_

_I received some news today that near knocked me off my feet and I need to tell somebody, as I cannot tell Alexander until he has finished his case and is back in London. However, you won’t get this letter until Alexander is back so, although I am telling you first, you won’t know until after he does._

_Technicalities aside, though I do like them. I just got the results of a test that I sent off several weeks ago: I’m expecting. I’m expecting a child. I’m absolutely terrified even though it was (vaguely) planned. We knew it was a possibility and were prepared to take on the responsibility. When I found out, I almost told Daisy before remembering that I ought to tell Alexander before I tell him._

_Yours,_

_Hazel Wong_

* * *

In a cruel twist of fate, Alexander arrives while I am in France, helping Daisy decode some on-site letters discovered from a house that had been inhabited by some spies.

While I am always overjoyed to see Daisy, to detect with her and work with her (despite the fact that it is our job), it was just an overload of itching irritation as I waited even longer to be able to tell Alexander.

“Hazel, you’re… you’re fidgeting,” Daisy says to me as we sit side-by-side in the house of a German spy, peering at codes lit by candlelight. The entire house is saturated with Nazi secrets, and overrun with investigative officers literally tearing them from the walls. “Stop it, it’s irritating.”

A moment passes and I still cannot stop moving, madly scattered with my hands touching my skirt, by buttons, my hair the paper, the candle, the shoes. “Hazel!” she snaps, grabbing my hands and holding them tightly. “What’s wrong?”

“I want to see Alexander,” I mumble lamely, my gaze falling into my lap. “I miss him.”

With a sigh, Daisy leans forward and kisses my cheek, brushing a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “Poor Hazel,” she says, squeezing my hands. “You’ll see him soon, I promise.”

“Not soon enough.”

She smirks, glittering eyes full of mischief shining in the candlelight. This was Daisy with A Plan.

On the landing below us, I hear a loud and aggressive interaction. “OUT OF HERE, YOU RUFFIAN!” bellows one of the French officers helping us with the clean-up.

“—PAPERS, I SAY!” I hear a familiar voice retort, the beginning swallowed up in the bag and crash of some officers running in through the back doors, crying out with a yell that they had found a package buried in the back garden. The voice is a London drawl halted by a clipped schoolboy diction, distinct because of its bossiness. “IF YOU DO NOT LET US IN—”

“George!” says a voice I know even better, and I know him so well that I know that these words are accompanied by him reaching out an arm to hold George back from whoever he is about to punch. “Calm down. See here, sir! My… my friend and I are the counterpart detective society to the two young women you have working for you. We have been called by a man who we believe to be your superior officer to assist them. We will thank you if you could let us past.”

I turn to Daisy and stare at her, and she grins back impishly. “Whoops?”

“Daisy, I love you,” I tell her, and I throw my arms around her.

With a laugh, she hugs me back tightly before getting to her feet. “Let’s go, Hazel.”

She grabs my hand and the two of us run down hand-in-hand, stumbling down thinly-carpeted stairs. Alexander and George are standing in the hall, George perfectly turned-out and Alexander travel-crumpled. I have witnessed this scene so many times, walking into rooms and greeting the Junior Pinkertons. I can’t help but recall the first instance of that interaction: Cambridge at Christmas in 1935. Our situation could not be more different: Alexander’s clothes fit properly and looks at me with love, while George still uses the same hair product but styles it in a different way. We all have lines on our faces, though Alexander has smile-lines creasing the corners of his eyes while George has a deep slash between his brows that looks as if has been cut there when he frowns.

“Alexander!” I shriek, running down the stairs and jumping from the second step into his waiting arms.

“Hazel!” he yells, wrapping his arms around my back and spinning me around. “Oh, Hazel!”

He sets me down with a burst of laughter, leaning down to kiss me lightly on the lips. “I would kiss you more,” I mumble against his lips, “but there are people watching us.”

Meanwhile, by our side, George and Daisy greet each other. Gracefully, George takes her hand and presses a kiss to her knuckles. “Ah, the Honourable Daisy Wells.”

“George Mukherjee, it’s a pleasure,” she says, dropping a curtsey with a twinkle in her eye.

The officer follows the frantic younger officers into the living room, while George and Daisy start up the stairs.

“We’ll join you,” Alexander calls up at George.

He smiles down at us before jogging after Daisy.

Alexander leans down and kisses me hard, gripping onto my cardigan. “Hazel,” he murmurs against my lips. “It’s good to see you, love.”

I lean up to his ear and, swallowing my nerves, breathe, “I’m expecting.”

With a gasp, he stumbles back against the bannister, eyes wide and fixed on my face. “H—Hazel!”

I cross one arm over my body, gripping onto my upper arm with my hands nervously. “Alexander?”

Half a minute passes, then he throws himself at me and wraps his arms around me. “Are you sure?”

I nod against his shoulder.

”I love you.”

I relax against him. “And I, you.”


End file.
